


Crossed Hearts

by Morbane



Category: Spinning Silver - Naomi Novik
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dubious Consent, F/M, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-14
Updated: 2020-01-14
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:55:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22252996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morbane/pseuds/Morbane
Summary: After Miryem's feat of high magic, the Staryk lord lays his hand on the flow of time and grants her a full day's relief.But a full day has a night at its end, and that has its own consequence.
Relationships: Miryem Mandelstam/The Staryk Lord
Comments: 17
Kudos: 165
Collections: New Year's Resolutions 2020





	Crossed Hearts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dawnstone](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dawnstone/gifts).



> For the prompt: Miryem/the Staryk, dubcon.
> 
> Content warnings: one character planning to kill another (as per canon); dubcon of the 'Character is making the best of limited choices' variety.
> 
> Many thanks to pendrecarc, without whose suggestions this would be much rougher. Its remaining flaws are entirely my own.

After sleeping through the night, and half the day, I roused myself only to sleep again in the bath - drowsing, startled awake again and again by ripples of fear. I dreamed I arrived at my grandfather's house to an empty ballroom, the guests departed; I dreamed I returned to the sunlit world to find it lifeless, ice through and through; and I dreamed that I turned my own body of flesh and blood to gold, but gold with a gleam as cold as fairy silver. When I woke properly at last, gasping, I sat up in a surge of water, and leaned over further to look for my reflection before the water was calm enough to form it. 

But there were still tones of red in my sallow cheeks. I was mortal yet, and this day out of time was fairly mine, won from the Staryk lord.

Or so I thought. When I got up at last from the bath, it was not servants who came, to exchange my robe for garments in which a Staryk queen might attend a wedding. It was my own husband.

Lifting my chin, narrowing my eyes, I met his regard. 

And quailed, though I tried not to show it. I had met his disdain without shrinking, his rage without flinching. I did not know what to do with _esteem_.

He said, "Lady, I will answer no questions for you tonight."

I said, "We had a bargain..."

"For your rights only," he said. "I set no value on mine."

For a moment I thought it was a trap he sprang on me knowingly. In making me his queen, he had acknowledged I had the rights of the marital bed. I had demanded information instead of that due. But I could not make the same bargain to _him_. There was nothing I could offer him except for gold, and with an act of high magic I had given him that beyond any expectation. I heard my own words back: _You cannot pay me in treasure._

But as I stared at him, he continued, "And for that insult I will make amends," and he knelt to me, an icicle bending, an avalanche descending from the heights of the sky to rest at my feet, and took and kissed my hand.

I opened my mouth and closed it again, letting my surprise show on my face. I thought even now I could stop this - if not with bargaining, then with argument. I could tell him, perhaps, that he must bring me to my cousin's wedding before any new bargain was made between us. I could argue for other conditions he must satisfy before I would consider myself wed. 

I could save myself with argument - and yet, if the Staryk lord came to my grandfather’s house suspicious and offended, the cost to bear might be dearer than what I had saved.

I thought of what I feared, and not what I wanted. And so wanting, when it came, surprised me. For a shiver ran from his hand to mine, and the lightest press of each of his fingernails above my wrist was a kiss of its own, and he knelt as though he would not grow impatient waiting - would slow time again merely that he might have longer to kneel. 

What mixed with my resolve – to deliver the Staryk to Irina, as I had promised, however it was done - was not pity, nor exactly longing, and nor, I thought, was I enthralled. 

I thought that if he were dead by the end of the night then so might I be, and the rights he had offered me would be one more thing I would never know. 

I wanted to know if there was anything in him like human caring – anything that could have passed for tenderness. If so, perhaps this would not be so bad. And yet, if so, he earned his doom twice over, if he had it in him to be gentle and had _chosen_ instead to threaten and compel. If not – then I would hate this, and hate him over again, and yet the planned end would feel cleaner: a dark end that never could have been brighter, because we never could have dealt with each other and set different terms.

And I thought that if I wanted to deceive him, I wanted as much to be deceived, to pretend that this was an ordinary marriage and that I had offered myself to the binding, rather than being bound.

I said, "How am I to believe that your rights have worth to you now, lord of the Staryk, who humbled himself so to crown a mortal girl beside him?"

Very slowly, he rose, slackening his grip but keeping his connection with me, his fingers curving into my palm.

"I cannot answer you," he said. "Thereby I lose my hope of showing you your worth to me - and so I say only that I was wrong to think myself humbled by the match."

And then he kissed me - kissed my parted lips, my face that I had turned upwards to him as I heard him out.

His lips were cool, and dry, and soft.

Before I was my family's moneylender, when we had bare straw and bare cupboards and I went out into the cold with bare hands, I would rub one hand with another, sometimes, to feel the softness of my own numbing skin under my fingers, as though my dulled flesh were its own glove separating fingers and fled nerves. His lips had that velvet coolness, there and only there - my curious hand on his face, now, found the planes of his features still hard. His face was smooth the way that polished wood is smooth. He blinked under my fingers; I shut my eyes. 

So I did not see when he stepped even closer to me; I felt it, as if I myself had stepped towards his vast cold - towards a door that opened out upon the winter. And his hand laid on the small of my back felt like that door swinging to close behind me.

He broke the kiss and bent again. His other hand slid behind my knees, and he lifted me in one smooth motion, not just easily but gently. He carried me across the chamber with measured steps so that each step came as a gesture, shifting my weight minutely in his hands. With my eyes still closed I could feel his gaze on me; on the seventh step I was brave enough to open my eyes again to meet it. He was still bright with something unsettlingly like admiration, and this time I thought I was prepared.

I asked, "What will you have of me?"

Again he turned aside the question - "No, my lady. What will you of me?"

A day out of time, a day I meant to be his last, and he asked me this and meant it! And I did not know. I had heard gossip in the market and at my grandfather's house, but not this kind; what I knew of love from my parents was kindness and modesty in front of me, and simple, unembellished explanations. I did not answer either. I turned my head and kissed his chest - the white weave over his heart.

He laid me down in the bower and began to undo the silver buttons of his shirt, and I said to him, almost, almost as I might have to an ordinary husband, "Show me what you want, so that I come to want it too." 

It was not a question, so he answered it. "Yes."

What he wanted, then, was to forget his half-clasped shirt and my thin robe and kiss me; to cup the back of my head as he kissed me, his fingers parting my hair; to press his hand to my side as he kissed me, as if the warmth there was a strength to him, rather than alien.

When he parted my lips with his tongue, we both hissed - the shock of it! I _felt_ the cold then, the way I might have in the sunlit world - cold that made my teeth tremble, made me imagine my mouth frosting white and crystals roughening my tongue. I wondered if, for his part, he breathed in flame. 

But, too, the thrill of it! Like plunging my hands into winter water, past its cracked surface, and the way it woke all of me, a bolt as brilliant as it was brutal, before the cold tightened around my bones. Here the chill that seized me was not so unforgiving - it did not grip so hard. And I kissed him and I did not freeze - he kissed me and he did not melt - and when he pulled his mouth away I raised myself a little to follow him.

He did not melt – so I thought. I thought, however, that there was a difference in his face, the faint blue veins deepening the marble-white like ice in shadow, tinted almost violet, something yielding in his smile, which had a softer curve than anything else about him. I wondered if for my part I looked colder, fiercer with my wanting, keen as a wind is keen.

He undid his shirt as we kissed, parting from me to only to shrug it away. He turned to sit beside me as he rid himself just as quickly of his other garments - but not so quickly that I could not splay my hand across his bare skin while he worked - and if I drew from him a shudder rather than a hiss, I thought he was no more displeased by it than he was accustomed to it.

He turned again, giving me no time to take in the whole of him, but kneeling beside me. He managed his own balance as effortlessly as he had mine. Both his hands were left free to settle on my thighs and slide up past them, lifting the robe off me in one long stroke.

I did not find his eyes cold.

His tongue between my thighs was as shocking as it had been at my mouth; I clutched at his shoulder, slowing him not at all - nor did I want to. I wanted _this_ , and yet it wasn't enough, even as his hair swept my thighs as cold and soft as water, even as he sucked at me and the flat of his tongue stroked me.

I said, "Please," and he raised his head. 

"My lady," he said. "Tonight I would not hear you beg."

He pressed his lips against mine, light but secure; he pressed his chest down upon mine, not heavy, but nor yielding in any way; his thighs pressed open my thighs, and - 

I had been told it would hurt, but the brief accommodating ache was nothing to the fierce jolt-pleasure sting-spark of the cold of him piercing the warmth of me. We met each other gasp for gasp, and I did not want my body to accustom itself to this strangeness. If, as in foreign stories, I could have made him mortal with our joining, with only a kiss, I would have wanted it _except_ in that moment, and in the long sharp moments that followed, each thrust as new and intense as the last.

I did not ask or beg. I gathered my breath together out of tatters and hissed, " _Give_ me what is in you to give." He did not answer except with his hips rocking against mine, his eyes glittering above me, his hand steady on my breast.

I thought I was already as deep in feeling as I could be, every nerve awoken, and yet the greatest swell of pleasure surprised me, coming out of rhythm with the Staryk’s movements, a wanting and a getting all wrapped up together, joy and not just relief. I saw him feel it as it surged through me - saw him smirk - and yet, however new it was to me, I thought: _no, this is not something you may claim._

His own gratification, when it came, did not seem so dramatic to me - he thrust harsher and shorter, half-buried in me and barely drawing out, quick bursts until the last, when he sighed a long sigh over me and stilled. Still he said nothing. He held my eyes for a moment that stretched longer than joy had, though as he eased his body free from mine the wet sleekness of him against my thigh set off a last spark of it.

He stood, his hand trailing across my navel, and smiled down at me. It was a satisfied smile - proud and possessive and full of self-congratulation. I could see, I supposed, why he thought himself entitled to all those things. But his triumph was all for himself. It was nothing that he shared, not as a clumsier, less rapturous kindness would have been.

For all the languor running through me, it was hard to smile back; I was glad that a nod of acknowledgement seemed to satisfy him.

He left, and I got up slowly, and this time it was servants who came to lead me where I must go.

I did not feel shame, and I did not feel - as perhaps I should have feared – new misgivings about what I meant to do to the Staryk king. I did not long for what might have been if he had courted rather than coerced me, because he hadn't. If I had earned his respect, it had come at far too high a price.

And even if I had not thought so, then I would have hardened my heart against him when we drove out through his kingdom to the sunlit lands, and when with a performer’s flourish he showed me the trick he'd played: he'd forced me not just to make treasure, but to make treason against my people, stealing their summer for his gain.


End file.
